Velma Dinkley's Journal
by Lywinis
Summary: "If this is found, then likely I have passed away. Please read this as a cautionary tale, survivor. May it help you more than it did me."
1. April 2

Velma Dinkley's Journal, April 2, 2009

* * *

_The First Outbreak, in China, was one of the worst. Traffic jams, panicked mobs… most of the deaths were probably caused by panic, that's what I usually hear what happened during the outbreaks… they awakened to a nightmare._

_The creatures. They were stronger then. There were pictures of the earlier cases. I hope that kind never appears again. Savage, strong, maliciously intelligent, cadavers possessed by an elemental hate, the black ooze pouring from their openings. The virus was horrible then, passed from people to people by breath droplets swimming in the air, or hand prints on doorknobs._

_Tianjing… the police got it together in the end. The military found them later, holed up in a central police station. Hundreds of them, citizens and policemen. But when they had crowded there to get away from the beasts, they put them in a worse position. The People's Army found them blackened with infected oil, their eyes glistening with hunger to shred skin and break bones._

_The Chinese were never good at quarantines. Tianjing went down in a day. The entire province, a day. The creatures moved faster then. But some of the infected were able to get on planes, and they left to bring the curse to other places across China. The cities of Kunming, Changsha, Harbin, and Zhangjiajie fell to the plague in the evening; most had gotten very little news of what was happening in Tianjing. There was no warning… what could they do?_

_It was the worst time. The beginning of the collapse._

* * *

Coolsville, Ohio hadn't been hit first, but it had been hit hard. Being just within easy driving distance of Akron had seemed convenient when there weren't zombies roaming around, but now the undead swarmed in, eager to feed on the families who had stubbornly refused to evacuate. The hospital had an influx of people who were showing up with bite marks before the news in China had gotten out. They had been treated and sent home, or kept overnight if the bite looked too serious. Within twenty-four hours, the virus had done its work, and the hospital had to be barricaded from the outside by the Ohio National Guard. Meanwhile, the local police, Shaggy's father included, were rounding up families in the city that had remained in their homes. A quarantine area went up in the middle of the city where the hospital was, and the quiet city of Coolsville was disturbed long into the night with the sounds of gunfire and screams.

By a lucky streak, the Mystery, Inc. crew had been home on break from college. When the quarantine went up, we headed out in the Mystery Machine to help move women and children away from the danger zone, into the ranks of the National Guard. Soon, though, the streets were empty, save for the few straggling undead that had somehow escaped the quarantine.

But numbers would avail the walking dead. No one could have predicted the influx of fresh, shambling zombies from the surrounding cities. As the National Guard tried vainly to keep the zombies in, more were coming across the borders from Akron, Columbus, and Cleveland. Soon, the idyllic city would be awash in flames, screams, and gunfire.

We all banded together to try and aid the people we knew and loved. Scooby Doo proved to be invaluable, his keen nose smelling the infection on the ones who had been bitten. The gang had hated to leave behind so many, but we had already reached the van's capacity by the time we had reached the halfway point of the city.

We had set up a safe way point for ourselves between the evacuation site and the areas where the National Guard still operated in pockets around the city. Using our rather sturdy van, we were able to move pretty freely through the area, grabbing survivors off rooftops and second floor windows and carting them to the relative safety of the evacuation site. The zombies were a relative scarcity in the city proper still, but there were still a few large groups gathered around the survivors, obviously. For those we could not save, all we could do was pass out bottled water and food rations and tell them that we would swing around again. we were lying, although we didn't know it at the time. Soon enough the suburban paradise's infrastructures began to crumble as more zombies began to pour in. Humanity began to succumb to the virus, little by little, until the police and the National Guard began to try and evacuate the citizens en masse to shelters set up out of the white zones.

Shaggy's father had been bitten during one of these evacuations, saving a young woman by throwing her aside as a shambling corpse grabbed her long hair. He sustained a bite on the shoulder, but was able to hide it under his riot gear for a long while. He couldn't hide it from Scooby Doo for long, though. When the formerly gentle Great Dane smelled the rotting wound, he went nearly insane, growling and barking and snarling and placing his big body in between Samuel Rogers and his family, especially Shaggy and his sister, Maggie.

Shaggy sent his mother and sister to the evacuation pad, telling them it would be safest for them there. He couldn't know he was wrong. He didn't know that the evacuation sites had been overrun. By staying with his father, he had unwittingly saved his own life and the life of his friends, but he had doomed his family.

It wasn't long before the fever set in, arcing high enough to be fatal even without the deadly bite, and Samuel was soon lost in delirium, his face going pale and his eyes showing signs of jaundice as his liver and kidneys began to fail. Rank with sweat and bile, his death was not something to be witnessed.

Shaggy witnessed it. So did I. Fred had taken Daphne to the other room. Still a gentle soul, she didn't handle the stress of the infection well. To put it mildly, zombies scared the bejeezus out of her. I stayed with Shaggy those last few hours. I held his hand, and I was the one to tell him his dad had finally passed away.

I will never forget the first gunshot I ever heard. I was little, and my uncle had taken my dad and I hunting. I was really there to watch the animals, so the roar of the rifle ripping through the air startled me to the point of crying.

When Shaggy pulled the trigger of the pistol that splattered his father's brains all over the basement wall, the silencer muted the blast. All there was to mark the passing of Samuel Rogers was the soft _pak _of a bullet.

We soon realized we couldn't hold out much longer. Our CB radio that Fred recently installed in the Mystery Machine wasn't picking up any signals. Radio silence was a bad thing. We had to move, and soon.

Coolsville, Ohio, was now a part of the largest white zone in the Eastern United States.

* * *

A/N: For those of you expecting another shot of _Obeisance _or _Aquila_ today, here's something a little different I've been working on. AUs fascinate me, and I really wanted to do something as a palette cleanser. So I took this old rough out of storage and polished them up. Hopefully you'll be as entertained as I hope you will. This ain't your daddy's Scooby Doo, for sure. As always, thanks for reading!

~Lywinis


	2. April 13

Velma Dinkley's Journal, April 13, 2009

* * *

Shaggy had not taken his father's death well. I ended up having to grab him by his arm as he held the pistol at his side, trembling from stress and shock. He nearly yelled in grief, had I not clapped a hand over his mouth and dragged him from the room. I took his pistol and made him some instant tea with our camp stove we had set up in the farmhouse basement. He stared at the wall for hours, tears streaking down his face and his long, thin frame wracked with silent sobs. Scooby Doo could barely raise a response, the Great Dane simply dropping his large head in Shaggy's lap and leaving it there as his master grieved.

I did what I could to make Shaggy comfortable until we were ready to leave, but there isn't much that one can do for someone who just shot their own father in the forehead to stop him from coming back as a ravening ghoul to feast on your flesh. I knew he was grieving, but we were all grieving. We had to push that aside for survival, though. All of our parents and siblings were missing or dead, and all we had was each other to rely on.

Strangely enough, after about a half an hour of sitting on the couch petting Scooby, Shaggy seemed to come to himself. He turned to look at me, and I could see that his eyes were red and his face was mottled from crying, but he smiled and asked what was for lunch, because he was "like, starving". I made a mental note to keep a close eye on Shaggy from then on. Stress can do strange things to a man in the best of times, and this was certainly not the best of times.

Sometimes I wonder if my parents would think that criminal psychology was an "imperfect science" after this. Certainly a dystopian society would be the perfect place to study the degeneration of society as a whole. Mankind was facing its final days, and I would be there to record it. I don't know whether this last realization made me happy or terrified when it first dawned on me, but as it is, I cannot remain impassive and scientific when I move through these chronicles. Some things simply cannot be viewed objectively, as you will soon see.

Things were looking even worse as we moved away from the white zone that was Ohio. As we moved to the southern border of the state, keeping to the back roads that Fred knew best, Daphne kept an ear to the CB radio we had. She was listening for something, anything but the static. We were alone, awash in a sea of carnage and death.

We chugged down the back roads, avoiding lone straggling ghouls, for what seemed like days as we shuffled past wrecks and pileups, even on these lonely highways. Some people had probably had the same idea of getting out of the state, and had started transporting sick or bitten family members immediately, without getting the full report from the news. When their passengers expired and then reanimated, the panicked drivers had more than likely been run off the road.

Of course, one could hardly blame them. The CDC was loath to release any kind of information at the beginning. I remember watching the leaked footage from Tianjing over the internet and being shocked at the brutality of the Chinese government's way of dealing with "insurgents". It wasn't until later that we knew that the military police were dealing with the horde exactly as they should have been. It was much too late for us by then. Once the news reports started advising that people who had been bitten be brought forward for quarantine it was much too late.

I digress, however. We were moving down the back highways of southern Ohio, thanking God that Fred has foreseen to put the winch on the front of the Mystery Machine like he always said he was going to do. Moving wrecked cars was a lot easier than opening the doors and throwing them in neutral. Mostly it was Fred and I doing a lot of the work. I think Daphne was in shock for most of the trip through our home state. She sat in the van while Fred and I pushed cars out of the way, Shaggy and Scooby watching our backs as we did so.

Shaggy had picked up a Mauser .44 carbine from somewhere. If I have not expressed admiration for this rifle before, then let me do so now. I have never seen a World War II era rifle take that much of a beating before today. I had heard stories from my uncle of how you could bury a Russian Mosin-Nagant in the mud for days, dig it up, clean it out, and it would fire forever without jamming, but this Mauser was something else. The rifle's butt stock saw more use than the actual functioning parts, however. We were trying to get out quickly and quietly, and the firing of a gun would just be ringing the dinner bell over our heads.

Fred seemed to be the only one besides myself handling this with any sort of decorum. He pointed out good locations to make camp, keeping a running commentary of what the military had been doing up until the point of radio silence, as far as he knew. And he knew quite a lot more than we did, being a field reporter for NBC. His press pass had gotten us into more than one place in the past, when we were still just "those meddling kids". It seems so long ago now.

After a few days of shoving wrecked cars out of the road and trundling down the highway at a slow but steady pace, we came across a sight I would never forget, not if I tried every mind altering substance on the planet. We pulled to a stop in front of a Chevy Suburban that had stalled in the middle of the highway. The first thing that seemed odd to me was the car seat in the middle of the road, covered with a blanket.

All of the SUV's doors had been left open to the elements, but there was a woman in the front seat. A cursory glance told me she was dead; if it hadn't been the gun in her hand, the red blossom in the middle of her forehead would have clued me in. As we stepped out of the mystery machine to get ready to move the car, Scooby's hackles went up and he let out the lowest, most menacing growl I had ever heard that cowardly dog make. His whole body bristled with fear or rage, I couldn't tell, and he was adamant about not letting Shaggy near the car seat in the middle of the road. Then I noticed it. The blanket was _moving_. Small grunts and gurgles were emanating from the car seat. Daphne shrank back against the van, and Shaggy moved back as well.

Fred swallowed hard and looked at the wriggling blanket. He turned to me and nodded. I drew my Beretta from its holster and stood point while Fred used the muzzle of his hunting rifle to very gently lift the blanket away from what it was covering.

I think this was the day I began to wonder if my faith in science instead of relying on religion to comfort me was justified. At least when you believe in religion you have something to fall back on. You at least have a cursory reason for believing this to be happening because of the will of a malevolent deity. There was no scientific explanation for this. I couldn't come up with a formula for how the living dead worked. All I knew was that they were dead and wrong and they wanted to kill me and my friends and eat our flesh. Nothing in all my years of hunting fake ghosts and unmasking villains had ever prepared me for this. Nothing ever could.

I admit I turned to the side and vomited what little breakfast I'd rationed myself. The smell is something one does not get used to. I still have a little trouble with it today, in fact. That day, under the blazing June sun, the smell was overwhelming, reaching up to my nostrils with rotting fingers and plunging them straight into my brain. I could _taste _the rot. My eyes watering, I turned back to the car seat and tried to take in what I was seeing.

The kid had been about four or five when it (no, it was a she, she had a sticker on her shirt from daycare, it said _Hannah_, remember?) had expired. Long blonde curls were matted and slicked with blood and gore. Her stomach had begun to distend from decomposing gases, and her skin was beginning to slough off. Black bile dripped out of her mouth and down her chin as the child snapped and snarled and tried to wriggle free of her car seat so she could get at us. As she moved, the source of her infection revealed itself; - a bite mark on her inner forearm. The blanket coming up off of her face had much the same effect as pulling a cover off a bird's cage. She reached for me, her eyes milky and occluded, and I retched again, dry heaving the last of the canned fruit I had eaten up and out of my stomach.

Fred looked nearly as sick. He raised his hunting rifle to his shoulder. Before I could stop him, he squeezed the trigger and a loud crack echoed across the highway. The car seat dropped back, the little girl finally put to rest with a bullet in her brain. As Fred made to pull the winch out to haul the SUV off the road, I grabbed the car seat and dragged it off the road. Grabbing the blanket, I covered the girl with it and turned to help.

Daphne put her arms around me then, and I realized I was crying. Tears were rolling down my face completely and utterly without me being aware of it. You see now why I cannot be partial and coldly analytical, gentlemen. I am way too close to my subject matter. But sometimes it is necessary for a scientist to get into her work. I…I think that's all for today, though. I cannot continue.

* * *

A/N: Two chapters for you, what a nice change of pace, eh? Again, not your daddy's Scooby Doo. For those of you not aware, I adore zombie movies and fiction, enough to attempt my own little AU with the Scooby gang as my puppets. First person is also a little more of a change of pace, too, because I have to allow adverbs in there, and those of you I've beta'd for know how much I hate adverbs. (You will get a word document marked in red back if you ask me to beta, no lie.)

Anyway, hope you enjoyed a walk on my darker side. I'll update this sporadically, when I see fit to dip more into this world. As always, thanks for reading!

~Lywinis


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